What is a Modern Business Experience? This Article Picks Out Some of the Ideas Discussed at the Oracle Modern Business Experience Seminar
Is your business a unicorn or a dinosaur? If, like Dun & Bradstreet, you are an established organisation that started a couple of centuries ago (or thereabouts), you are likely to be a bit of both. These days though, legacy is anything pre-cloud, so that includes most large corporations. Matthew Guest, Deloitte’s Head of Digital Strategy, made a lot of sense at the Oracle Modern Business Experience seminar discussing how businesses need to think a bit more like start-ups to innovate and stay ahead of the pack, reduce costs and alleviate customer pain points.
But, what start-ups have that older organisations don’t is the ability to map the customer journey at day one before investments in tech and people resources are made. Oracle are in fact a partner of Dun & Bradstreet, and the broad suite of tools in their kit bag provide every opportunity for joined-up business and smooth customer interactions, but it is not the tech that stifles connectivity. It is the data.
A fact nicely put at the conference through Oracle’s own research with leading CMOs’, ‘poor quality of data hinders most businesses ability to drive growth’, and less can be more, if ‘we keep the data simple’ it is more likely to be populated and maintained. Then, reporting and ultimately key decisions can be made based upon facts, as opposed to intuition.
An analogy can also be drawn out when you look at marketing strategy, there is so much tech, and noise in the sector, that working out what to implement, and how to measure activity is becoming increasingly hard. Coupled with the change in people skills, with much more specialisation in the marketing arena, often making it difficult to see the wider picture and losing sight of the customer.
However, whatever tech stack you choose for your marketing department, or how you marry first party with third party data, and which regulatory frameworks you need to consider (I didn’t mention GDPR), do spare a thought for data quality and how you are going to effectively input data and maintain it. Whether a unicorn or a dinosaur, you can still have sound data upon which to make your decisions and drive your activity.